YMMV / The Disney Afternoon

• Awesome Art: Some of the most solid, expressive and fluid hand-drawn animation ever made for television, as well as some truly gorgeous background paintings, can be found in the earlier shows. It can't be overstated how much of a step up it was from virtually all TV animation up to that point.
• Awesome Music: The theme song is bright, cheery, and so much fun! The individual theme songs qualify as well.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Genre Turning Point: Prior to the shows featured on the block and, really, for the entirety of the medium's existence up to that point, animated series made for television were often forced to rely on bare bones, heavily stylized visuals, low-stakes plots and lots and lots of dialogue due to their paltry budgets. Then Disney gets in on the game, self-producing shows with money out of their very deep pockets which allows for both higher-quality animation and ambitious storytelling, the kind that could only be seen in their feature films up to that point. Their success would pave the way for the next 20+ years of TV animation, with budding cable TV stations following their model (Nickelodeon with Games Animation, later renamed Nicktoons Studios, and Cartoon Network absorbing Hanna-Barbera's assets into Cartoon Network Studios).
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: This program was massively popular in South Korea. Despite airing at Saturday 8 AM in local time, it made many kids of 90s wake up early just to watch the show.
• Magnificent Bastard: See here
• No Problem with Licensed Games: The games released for these shows are generally considered good, though the TaleSpin NES game isn't remembered as fondly. Still, one could imagine the excitement for when The Disney Afternoon Collection was released.
• Once Original, Now Common: Like all things groundbreaking, most of what made the block special has been copied and improved upon enough in the decades since that it can be hard for newcomers to appreciate:
  • It raised the standards of TV animation from assembly line-quality to one closer to that of feature films. After decades of technology catching up to the demands of a TV schedule and budget, it doesn't seem nearly as impressive and, in fact, can make any Off-Model moments much more noticeable.
  • Thanks to the higher quality animation, the block also allowed for more ambitious storytelling. This, too, became a new standard, with the stories and characters of TV cartoons not only becoming more ambitious but nuanced, to the point that more than a few retroactive viewers have complained about the block's shows having cheesy, predictable plots and flat characters.
• Presumed Flop: Many of its later shows are seen as failures, mainly those that only aired for one season, as Fox Kids and Nickelodeon started to lure its viewership away.
  • Goof Troop is often seen as the beginning of the end, with its competition with Batman: The Animated Series typically seen as a Curb-Stomp Battle that the Dark Knight won with ease. However, ratings data showed that Goof Troop easily held its own, and occasionally even beat Batman from time to time. Its cancellation wasn't because of any ratings issues, but rather due to a combination of its high production costs, the brief dissolution of Disney's partnership with ABC (which aired the show on its Saturday morning lineup), and an overall drop in ratings among kids' demographics that year.
  • Bonkers is regarded as trying and failing to take on Animaniacs despite the fact that, in most big markets, its direct competition was Batman, which was an entirely different kind of series. Rather, Disney's decision not to make any more episodes beyond the initial order is likely more because of its Troubled Production than anything else.
  • The Shnookums & Meat Funny Cartoon Show is often lumped in among the failed attempts to capitalize on the success of The Ren & Stimpy Show. Yet evidence shows that it did fairly well as far as syndicated cartoons were concerned. The more likely factors leading to its present day obscurity are Disney suddenly choosing to bury it just before its premiere, likely a result of shifts in Disney's corporate management as a result of Jeffery Katzenberg leaving the company to found DreamWorks SKG the year before, as well as it being the only Disney Afternoon show to air only once a week throughout its entire run^note Gargoyles ran once a week before being promoted to five days a week for its second season, and while Timon & Pumbaa and Mighty Ducks: The Animated Series only aired once per week on the block proper, both also ran Saturday mornings on CBS and ABC respectively, not to mention Disney Channel never airing it outside of special airings to promote its less widely available sister network Toon Disney.
• Seasonal Rot: If one considers each new lineup of animated series "a season", fans generally agree that the block took a noticeable dip in quality around the time of Goof Troop and Bonkers, which began the trend of shows with unambiguously contemporary settings and distinctly 90s culture (in more ways than one) supplanting the more timeless fantasy, adventure, and crime-fighting plots of the first batch of shows. Though it’s agreed that shows like Quack Pack were the final nail in the coffin for the block.
• Values Dissonance: Many of the shows' plots drew heavy inspiration from entertainment from the '30s and '40s and were created just before political correctness became a popular mindset. As such, many of them have a surprising amount of gun use, Yellow Peril, Hollywood Natives, and fat-shaming.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: In addition to the excellent character animation, many of the shows (especially DuckTales and Rescue Rangers) feature equally fluid scenes of notoriously difficult to animate vehicles.

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